Just what has happened to real celebrity? I don't mean the 'sub-lebrity' we have today.

These modern 'celebs' who seem to possess little talent, strip off to flash their knickers at the drop of a flashbulb or become famous (or try to) by dating someone famous, preferably a footballer. This type of paper fame soon evaporates and, within a relatively short time, many of them go from the glitter to the gutter.

I mean the real celebrities; the ones, like Ava Gardner, Clark Gable, Rita Hayworth and Ingrid Bergman, who were incredible actors with incredible talents and true star power. Because, in this world of the sub-lebrity, they do not exist today - and I'll tell you why.

The nouveau celebrity rot seemed to start at the beginning of the decade with the arrival of the new 'entertainments' of reality television (Big Brother, I'm A Celebrity...., Wife Swap, X Factor, Strictly Come Dancing and so on), to feed the appetites of a public eager to watch heartbreak, adultery, torture and hatred served up to them daily and nightly on their omnipresent boxes.

And, as a result, utter nobodies became instant celebrities, often garnering front pages in the tabloids and covers on magazines - and these wannabes demeaned themselves by eating animal intestines or marrying someone the public voted for or seriously injuring themselves attempting to dance. Their instant fame had absolutely nothing to do with dedication to a craft, talent or even hard work. Instead, it was: 'Look at me, I'm famous' - and that's all they wanted.

Devoid of talent, beauty or charm, in order to stay in the public eye, they have had to rely on self-serving antics. And, of course, every headline-grabbing time, the antics have become more and more bizarre and outrageous. So we have had Britney Spears publicly shaving her head (as she had a very public breakdown) and causing paparazzi chaos whenever she ventured out of her house; various celebrities dieting themselves down to skeletal proportions, yet insisting they don't have an eating disorder; bipolar former pop star Kerry Katona having liposuction simply to get publicity in a magazine article; and the ever-present Jordan - aka Katie Price - who seems to love a headline more than her children.

Whether I'm in England or America - I divide my time between the two - I can't escape them. The latest show to air on British TV is a programme called Jon And Kate Plus 8. It's already a huge hit in the U.S. and 'stars' Kate and Jon Gosselin. Right now, they're the biggest 'A-listers' in the U.S.

Never heard of 'em? No, neither had I until recently. They are an extremely surly, charmless, unattractive couple who had eight children, made a reality show about their family and then separated. But for some weird reason the American - and now British - public has taken them to heart and they now appear on the celebrity magazine covers constantly, as well as many of the nightly entertainment shows.

And they've done nothing, said nothing and, in fact, are utterly without any appealing characteristics. They're loathsome and dislikeable.

All of this begs the question: what has happened to the true celebrity? Where are the Marilyn Monroes, the Elizabeth Taylors, the Richard Burtons and the Jackie Kennedy Onassises?

Today, the magazines and entertainment shows are populated with people who don't have much talent, but loads of chutzpah and who are managing to crawl up the ladder of populist celebdom by fair means or foul.

The X Factor is a brilliant case in point. The more gruesome, raucous and appalling the act in the early auditions, the more everyone seems to love it.
Simon Cowell nicknamed John and Edward Grimes (or Jedward) 'those vile twins' - and rightfully accused them of being talentless, little swaggering exhibitionists. Yet the public loved them, Simon had to listen and they soared in mind-boggling popularity and got through to the final six acts.

Then there is Jordan. There were other glamour models - Jodie Marsh and Melinda Messenger - but Jordan triumphed and her career is a phenomenon, embracing all aspects of her multiple vocations (topless modelling, chat show host, entrepreneur, children's author and so on). But she pays someone else to write her books and basks in all the tabloid attention, while wailing to be left alone or 'get closure' over her divorce as she eats bugs in the jungle on I'm A Celeb. . .

The most depressing consequence of our obsession with 'sub-lebrities' is that the real stars - the actors who are attempting to craft a career from talent and long years of training - are being left on the breadline as the airwaves are clogged with reality shows.

But their TV bosses know it's cheaper to make a reality show with unknowns who might become famous (or wannabes and glamour models desperate for those 15 minutes of fame) than to produce sitcoms or dramas in which they would have to pay professionals.

So today's minor celebrities - lacking any true discernable talent to maintain their fame and desperate for as much attention as possible - need to behave ever more outrageously to garner headlines. Every day the news is full of some starlet or wannabe singer falling down drunk or dressing like a bag lady in expensive rags.

But the saddest part about our obsession with sub-lebrities is that so many young girls strive to emulate them. If Britney falls down and is sick in the gutter, then too many young girls seem to think that if it's OK for her, it's OK for them, too.

Ever since the dawn of movies, the young have copied their stars and idols. In the Thirties, Forties and Fifties the studios were strict about how their talent behaved, as the studios rightly believed they were role models for the young. Hence the stars behaved impeccably when the spotlight was on them and although they might misbehave (and often did), it was well behind closed doors.

The studio publicists kept all naughty shenanigans out of the papers and the media, by and large, went along with it. Although everyone knew about JFK's philandering, Loretta Young's out-of-wedlock baby with Clark Gable and Rock Hudson's homosexuality, not a whisper appeared in the Press.

The true stars of the Forties, Fifties and Sixties were larger than life and incredibly charismatic and glamorous. I was lucky enough to meet some of them as a young actress arriving in Hollywood at the end of the Golden Age, when sadly the gilt was beginning to tarnish. TV was taking over and the studios were rarely signing new actors.

I was put under contract around the same time as Kim Novak, Shirley MacLaine and Jayne Mansfield, and we all had to conform to the groomed and glamorous appearance demanded by our respective studios. I was severely castigated when I once appeared at lunch in jeans and without make-up.

One of the great stars I met was Elizabeth Taylor, then just married to her third husband, film producer Michael Todd. Not only was she a true beauty, she was also down to earth and fun. She'd been a movie star since the age of seven and knew how to behave like one.

We dined at a restaurant on Sunset Strip called La Rue and she was dressed to the nines (as was I) in satin, mink stole and diamonds. I'd admired her since childhood. She deserved the accolades for her beauty, sheer star power and the epic quality of her lifestyle.

Then I met Ava Gardner - dangerously gorgeous and a headline-making superstar who often downgraded herself by saying she couldn't act. Well, she could. She had true talent and that indispensable star power.

The public was more savvy then. Actors didn't become stars unless they truly had the real X factor. There were loads of Marlene Dietrich or Hedy Lamarr wannabes, but the real versions made it because they were truly exceptional in every way.

Of course, the ultimate celebrity of all time is still Marilyn Monroe. In the 47 years since her death, hundreds of books have been written about her and her beauty still looks modern. I wonder how many of today's sub-lebrities would ever achieve that degree of longterm fame and adulation?

True celebrity is not just a passing fad. True celebrities' images won't fade - unlike those of the sorry crop of nobodies who passed for 'stars' in the Noughties.

I can't remember seeing many pictures of Joan's sister - the novelist Jackie Collins - when she was young, but here she is in 1954, and how we know her today. This was actually part of story she told about Marlon Brando seducing her in 1953 when she was a fifteen-year-old aspiring actress (dailymail.co.uk):

'I didn't know any better and he was very thin then. He was my favourite movie star - I'd seen The Wild One 26 times - and then I met him at a party.

'He stared straight at my 39in chest - men often talk to my chest - and said, "That's a great looking body you have, little girl". It was a mutual attraction. He had girlfriends but I didn't care.

'It was such a thrill for me because it was the most amazing introduction to Hollywood. I had only been there a week and there was my favourite movie star coming on to me.
'I saw him on and off for a while and then it was over. He was a great character.'

Not only was her affair with Brando illegal, it was also the cause of a rift between her and her elder sister, actress Joan Collins, who also had a relationship with Brando.

Joan poses for a Dynasty-inspired photoshoot for jeweller Alexis Bittar, who has unveiled a costume jewellery line called 'superbitch', said to have been inspired by the Alexis Carrington character (dailymail.co.uk):

Joanie landed the gig with Bittar after she praised him in an interview. 'I don’t collect real jewels as I travel so much but I have a vast selection of costume jewellery since I was a teenager. Alexis Bittar is by far my favourite costume jewellery designer...His whimsical designs suit my personality effortlessly. I always feel glamorous and sexy whenever I adorn myself in his creations.'

And soon after the designer, flattered by Collins’s mention, asked the Brit icon to star in his ad campaign. Her response: 'Oooh! ‘Alexis for Alexis’… how brilliant! Count me in.'

With her dark glasses, expensive chiffon dress and designer shoes, the woman in the dole queue could not have looked more out of place among the down-and-outs, deadbeats and drunks shuffling towards the counter. She had arrived at the unemployment benefit office on Los Angeles's Santa Monica Boulevard in a glittering gold Mercedes. When she reached the front of the queue, the clerk behind the desk gave a gasp of astonishment. "Weren't you Joan Collins?" she asked, her eyes widening.

"I still am," muttered the woman. "Then what are you doing here?" asked the clerk. "I'm not working at the moment," mumbled the actress, inwardly cursing the Hollywood friends who had talked her into signing on. "I'm resting."

Within seconds the entire room was agog. Joan Collins? The actress? On the dole? The clerk was brisk. Had she been trying seriously to get a job? Had she tried anything other than acting? Waitressing, perhaps? Working in an office? Typing? Eventually Joan was given a slip to say she would be paid her benefit in a couple of weeks, once her case had been investigated.

But as she sped off in the Mercedes, red-faced, she felt so humiliated that she swore not to return for the money - and never again to ask for a handout from anyone.

She had been trying for some time to get film parts but at the age of 43, she had long since fallen out of favour in Hollywood, where once she had been a starlet. "Joan who?" people asked, and with typically feisty bravado she'd bought a numberplate for the gold Mercedes that read JOANWHO. Her agent had taken her out to lunch and gently suggested her acting days were over. Perhaps, Joan pondered, she really should try another job - writing, maybe, or interior design. And oh, how she succeeded. Thirty years on, the thought of Joan Collins in a dole queue seems almost unimaginable.

Today, as she approaches the age of 75, she is an international icon, admired and even loved by men and women all over the world. Besides her beauty, they cherish her impish wit, her independence, her dogged courage and self-confidence in the face of disaster.

She has often been ridiculed unfairly for her acting, yet even in her worst films - and there have been plenty of stinkers - she has usually been the best ingredient. To her legions of fans, she is the ultimate survivor, a trouper who is able to adapt herself to suit the mood of the moment, encapsulating the never-say-die British spirit.

The late Lynda Lee-Potter, who was a Mail columnist for many years and a personal friend of Joan's, once put it like this: "She's given a lot of fun over the years, and sometimes we've laughed at her. But she's proved that if women are bold enough they can have everything."

Joan herself has attributed her success to always thinking positively - a philosophy that has enabled her to survive all manner of personal and professional setbacks. But rarely can it have been put to such a stern test as it was on that day in 1976, as she drove home from the dole office vowing to turn her life around. By any standards, Joan's problems at that time were pressing.

Her third husband, Ron Kass, had developed a serious cocaine habit and had recently lost his job as the highly paid boss of an American film company, leaving the family with a string of huge debts. Joan was so miserable she had even joined a fashionable "actualisation" self-help group. She was taken aback, however, when, after confessing in front of a room full of strangers how awful her marriage was, she was told by the group's leader that she should be nicer to her husband and more understanding of his problems.

To add to Joan's woes, her children Tara and Sacha - her daughter and son from her marriage to her second husband, the musician Anthony Newley - and Katy, her daughter with Ron Kass, had not settled in Los Angeles, where they'd moved from London the previous year. Tara, aged 11, was being bullied because of her English accent, while nine-year-old Sacha was simply bewildered by the family's apparent rootlessness.

And then there was the problem of work: even more vital now that the family's only income was Joan's regular maintenance payment from Anthony Newley - not nearly enough to pay for Ron's drugs, his ex-wife's alimony and Joan's expensive spending habits.

In a conversation before she'd left London for Los Angeles, Joan's father Joe, a theatrical agent, had advised her that if she wanted to kickstart her flagging career, she might do well to consider stripping off on screen. He could never have predicted quite what an impact those words would have. As she pondered her next move, Joan remembered how some years previously she had persuaded her sister Jackie, the bestselling novelist, to let her have the film rights to her blockbuster The Stud, the story of a randy London disco manager and his conquests. Plans to make the film had been drawn up and then shelved, but they could easily be revived. Might this be the answer to her problems?

At around the same time the legendary Hollywood agent Irving 'Swifty' Lazar came up with another money-making scheme: that she should write a kiss-and-tell autobiography. Why not? She had been good at English at school and had always enjoyed writing. A bestseller could help solve her immediate financial problems.

Events moved swiftly. Jackie agreed to write a sexy screenplay for The Stud and Joan, as well as setting to work on her autobiography, began hunting for a leading man. Her first choice, singer Tom Jones, declined the offer, feeling that the part was too raunchy even for him. She then considered Starsky and Hutch actor Paul Michael Glaser, who turned her down, followed by the boxer John Conteh and George Best. But within a few months Joan had not only signed up the sultry Swiss-born actor Oliver Tobias to play the part of the stud, she had also persuaded George Walker, boss of a movie distribution company, to bankroll the film in exchange for an agreement that she would appear in it naked.

Five years previously Joan had pronounced in a newspaper interview: "I won't ever strip in a movie. I think a woman, and a man for that matter, are more exciting with their clothes on. Garbo never stripped. Dietrich kept her clothes on and so did Vivien Leigh. And who is more glamorous than them?" But times had changed, and Joan was now desperate for money. If she had to get her kit off to make some cash, even though she was 44, then so be it.

The film, a vulgar, raucous, soft-porn movie, took just four weeks to make in the November of 1977 and depicted Tobias being used and abused by one tacky woman after another - but mainly by Joan in her role as the predatory, nymphomaniac wife of the disco's rich owner. She and Tobias are shown having sex in a lift, having sex on the back seat of a limousine, having sex in a swimming pool during a wife-swopping orgy, and having sex on a swingchair decorated with flowers. There are numerous shots of Joan and other women naked and one slow close-up of languid nipple-licking.

Eight years later, at the height of her fame in the TV series Dynasty, Joan admitted that she regretted making the movie. "Looking back in embarrassment I cringe and say: "Oh my God, did I do that?"" she confessed. "But you see, I was hungry then, and when you're hungry you often do things that go against the grain. The nudity went against my grain quite a bit, but I was talked and conned into it. There's no way I would do a film like that today."

Yet Oliver Tobias recalled that when Joan stripped off for their sex scenes she was not at all reluctant - "she got right into it, loved it" - and her husband Ron, who directed the film, denied that she had been forced to shoot these sections against her will. "Joan has often blamed me for forcing her to do things like nudity and sex sequences," he said. "It's not true. During filming of The Stud we choreographed the love scenes the night before. We ended up making love because she always roused me - she always could."

Tobias also came to regret appearingin the film, pronouncing that the script had been irretrievably shallow and that he had been paid "peanuts". Joan retaliated by saying she'd never wanted him in it anyway and that he smelled of garlic.

The Stud was released in April 1978. Although it was savaged by the critics it took more than £2 million at today's prices in just ten days - a British box-office record - and went on to become the highest-selling British video ever. Joan was about to become a very rich woman - but not before another intriguing money-making offer had come her way. It happened during lunch with a girlfriend at a Hollywood restaurant when David Niven's son, also David, came over and introduced her to a short, non-descript Frenchwoman whose name was Madame Claude.

The woman complimented Joan and her friend on their beauty and asked whether they wanted to earn some spare cash - she had many clients, she said, who preferred older women to young ones. Joan suddenly realised that this was the Madame Claude, the most famous brothel madame in France, who provided rich and famous men with stunningly beautiful, intelligent-call girls. "You two girls could do very well indeed," said Madame Claude, "and your husbands don't have to know." They accepted her card, promised to call her - and giggled all the way home.

A month after the release of The Stud, Joan's autobiography, Past Imperfect, hit the streets of Britain. It caused an instant sensation, blasting straight into the bestseller lists. She knew that if the book was to make money it would have to be as spicy as possible, so she included explicit descriptions of even the most reprehensible, embarrassing and tasteless episodes of her life. These included sadistic assaults by a homosexual boyfriend when she was at drama school, her abortion of Warren Beatty's baby, and her startling promiscuity - with, among others, actors Ryan O'Neal and Terence Stamp, and Charlie Chaplin's son Sydney. She also wrote openly about her marriage to Anthony Newley and his taste for under-age girls.

Newley, an entertainer of prodigious versatility and talent, had confessed to her before they married that he had a helpless, legally dangerous sexual obsession with nymphets, especially those of 14 or 15. She agreed to marry him after he promised to try to control his urges. Such unashamed honesty was her autobiography's greatest virtue, but there were some possible anomalies - such as the story of her alleged rape by her first husband, the heart-throb actor Max Reed.

Joan recounted how, on their first date, Reed had picked her up in his huge, flashy, blue American car and instead of taking her out to dinner had driven her straight to his flat in the West End, given her a doctored whisky and coke and a book of pornographic pictures and gone off for a bath. According to Joan she passed out, and then came round, vomiting to realise that he had raped her while she had been unconscious. Joan, who was just 18 at the time, alleged that Reed then forced her to have oral sex with him before driving her home at 3.30am. She claimed to have been terrified and revolted by the experience - yet the very next night she agreed to meet him for dinner because, she explained, she was flattered that he wanted to see her again.

Whatever the truth, Joan announced that writing her memoirs had changed her life. "It was like shedding my old skin and becoming someone else - someone very mature and confident," she said. "I'm no longer naive and gullible as I used to be. Thank God, I think I've finally grown up."

Perhaps a little naivete remained, because when the book was serialised by a Sunday newspaper, Joan was appalled to see her lurid stories being turned into headlines. Realising just how startlingly indiscreet she had been, she rushed round Los Angeles trying to buy every copy of the paper that she could find to prevent her friends and acquaintances reading it. Most of her former lovers lay low and did not react to what they probably felt was tacky kiss-and-tell treachery to add to the sleaze of The Stud. But Tony Newley, who was earning a huge amount writing songs, appearing on American television and the U.S. cabaret circuit, was incensed by what she had written about him. His bitterness was to fester for years, and infected the couple's children Tara and Sacha.

Tara was by now 14 and wearing a rebellious ring through her nose, while Sacha was 12 and suffering taunts about his flighty mother from boys at school. Both were deeply disturbed by The Stud and their mother's book - of which, with more astonishing naivete, Joan gave each a copy. ""It's disconcerting to see your mother naked,' Tara said years later. "A bit like trying to imagine your parents bonking." In recent years, Tara has also confessed that she felt she missed out on family life because of Joan's work commitments. "Having a famous mum has been a real handicap," she said. "Sometimes it felt like having a "Kick Me" sign around my neck. Many times I really wished for a mum who was there to cook me dinner and help with my homework. But that was not the way it was."

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However, Joan saw it differently. "I'd say for a working mother I did pretty well," she once said. "I was basically the breadwinner. I was not able to be with my children 12 hours a day, but I was forever giving a list to the nanny saying "she's got to do her homework, he's got to go to football practice, the baby's going out to tea," and at the same time I had to think of the part I was playing. Of course children want their mother there all the time, but it was impossible. I'm basically a gipsy. I create my nest wherever I am."

In another interview, she said that Sacha and Tara "had a terrible life", confessing: "I felt awful about it at the time." For a mother, it was probably not the best idea when Joan offered Tara an unusual 14th birthday present: to pay for her to have plastic surgery on her nose. "It was very upsetting and it still hurts," Tara said. "I don't like my nose: it's too big and not the nose I would have given myself, but it's my nose." She declined the offer. Later she rebelled by becoming a surly punk; she wore her hair in spikes, dyed it black, blonde and pink, went to school in torn clothes fastened with safety pins, began to drink alcohol, and had the word "mother" tattooed on her arm. Tara and Sacha told Joan that they now no longer wanted to live with her but would rather be with Anthony Newley and his new girlfriend, a former air hostess named Dareth Rich, who had established a stable family home in Beverly Hills where both children felt loved and secure.

Joan dismissed Dareth contemptuously as "that stewardess" but Tara and Sacha saw her as an ideal, homely, loving mother figure. Joan was devastated by their decision but defiantly maintained: "I'm not the type to slave over a stove concocting home-made soup. I want to be out in the arena of life." She admitted that Tara had once said to her: "You've been out three nights in a row and we feel you don't care." The children were to live with their father for the next two years.

Back in England, Katy, now six, was being teased and bullied by classmates because of her mother's sexy image. This was to intensify a year later, when Joan made a raunchy sequel to The Stud entitled The Bitch. Once again, she justified her performance by claiming she was hard-up and needed the money. Once again, she claimed that Ron Kass and film boss George Walker had forced her to do naked scenes she did not want to do, and that Walker had bellowed: "F*** creativity! That doesn't sell tickets. T**s and a**e do." Her sister Jackie, who wrote the story, denied all responsibility.

"The sex in The Stud was meant to be subliminal," she said. "But when I saw it, there was Joan totally naked on a swing. She did the same thing in The Bitch. I don't know why she did it because I never wrote those scenes. She rubbishes them now but I can't help thinking to myself: "Well, nobody held a gun to your head, baby.""

The Bitch was promoted in London with huge posters showing Joan in a corset, suspenders and black stockings and carrying the slogan: "Now you can see all of me." Her daughter Katy was given such a rough time by her schoolmates that she became seriously upset, and Joan screened a short film at her school containing extracts from her more respectable productions to show the girls that she did not always play indecent parts. That was one aspect of Joan Collins as a mother. A near-tragedy was about to reveal a different one.

The summer of 1980 started well for her. Not only had her financial worries eased, thanks to her raunchy re-invention, but her two older children had decided they wanted to live with her again in London, where she and Ron Kass were now spending most of their time. Early in August, she and Ron took Tara on a trip to Paris, leaving eight-year-old Katy behind with a schoolfriend in Crowthorne, Berkshire. That afternoon the girls were playing in a country lane when they stepped suddenly into the road and were knocked down by a car, whose 18-year-old driver was completely unable to avoid them, even though he was driving carefully at 27 mph. Katy's head smashed against a concrete kerb, leaving her with head injuries so terrible that doctors said she was unlikely to survive. When she heard the news in her hotel suite that night, Joan went into hysterics, screaming: "No, no, no! Not Katy! Not my baby!" and sobbing uncontrollably.

As she chain-smoked and drank brandy Ron tried desperately to book a flight to London but there was nothing until 9am the following day, by which time, they thought, Katy might be dead. The situation was saved by Joan's father Joe, who arranged for one of his well-off clients, the singer Roger Whittaker, to fly out in his nine-seater jet and pick them up at 6am. At the hospital they found Katy in intensive care in a deep coma, deathly white, frail and tiny, connected to a jungle of tubes, a ventilator, and with all her beautiful blonde hair shaved off. Joan asked the doctor what were her chances of survival. "Sixty to forty against," he said. Again, she sobbed uncontrollably. In the midst of her anguish, Joan wondered whether she might be able to help keep Katy alive by talking to her, even though she was deeply unconscious. There was nothing to lose. For days and nights she kept it up, not stopping even to put on make-up.

For six weeks Joan and Ron lived in a caravan in the hospital car park and each day Joan talked to Katy constantly, hanging colourful mobiles above her bed, wafting strong-smelling odours under her nose, singing to her, playing music, stroking parts of her body with feathers or silk and shining a torch into her eyes. Slowly, ever so slowly, Katy began to come round, but even then Joan and Ron faced a new misery: the doctors warned them she might be permanently brain-damaged and blind, deaf, mute, or all three. Ron and Joan redoubled their efforts and one of Katy's favourite actors, Jon Pertwee, gave her an hour-and-a-half bedside performance as his TV character Worzel Gummidge. After six weeks her parents were able to take her to their London home in Mayfair. She had to learn to speak, smile, cry, walk and write again but at least she was home and improving.

There is no doubt that it was the indomitable Joan as well as the doctors who had saved her daughter's life. The ordeal had taken its toll. Joan had vowed to give up eating chocolate until Katy was fully recovered, but to survive the nightmare she was now smoking and drinking heavily. Ron had turned to drugs and junk food, and in a matter of weeks had put on nearly three stone in weight. The best cure for Joan's torment was to get back to work - and it duly came, in a phone call that was to change her life.

Aaron Spelling, the executive producer of Charlie's Angels, wanted her to fly urgently to Los Angeles and join the cast of a new weekly TV soap called Dynasty. It would later emerge that Spelling had already offered the part of Dynasty's champion bitch, Alexis Carrington, to Sophia Loren and Raquel Welch, who had both turned it down. Only then did he approach Joan. "Thank goodness we did," he later admitted. "She made that show a hit."

Within six weeks of her first appearance Dynasty was in the top five in the American ratings and a few weeks later had reached number one. By the end of the year Alexis was hugely popular in dozens of countries all over the world, and Joan was suddenly a bigger star than she had ever believed possible. Every newspaper in the world seemed to be obsessed by her. Her face was splashed on the covers of scores of magazines, her every move recorded. Within a year she was getting an average of 12,000 letters from fans every week.

Her marriage to Ron was on the rocks, however, with even her huge rise in salary proving insufficient to solve all their financial problems. She afterwards claimed she'd had to work on Dynasty for four years before she had paid off all the debts. Ron had returned to Los Angeles with her but was now completely enslaved by his drug dependency. At one party given by the couple, guests were fascinated to see in the throng, quaffing champagne, a huge, sinister stranger who turned out to be Ron's cocaine pusher. The end of their marriage came one night after a dinner with Joan's agent in Beverly Hills. "Joan asked, all matter-of-fact, if I'd like to see an apartment with her," Ron recalled. They drove to a luxury block of flats where Joan produced a key. "It's beautiful," he said. "Yes," said Joan, "and I've paid the rent on it for three months for you." Ron was stunned: "Just like a hard-selling estate agent she pointed out the advantages - the view, the furnishings, the maid service, even the TV with every conceivable cable channel." That night, at home, she made him sleep in his study. The next morning he moved out of their house and she had all the locks changed. The Kass marriage was over.

To make Joan even happier, she was given one of the ultimate actors' accolades a few days later when she appeared with a distinguished cast on the Night Of 100 Stars TV variety show at Radio City Music Hall in New York. Among the other performers were many of the biggest names in showbusiness, including Lauren Bacall, James Cagney, Bette Davis, Sammy Davis Jr, Douglas Fairbanks, Grace Kelly and Ginger Rogers. As Joan arrived with her old friend Roger Moore, they were mobbed by crowds screaming: "Alexis! We love you, Alexis!"

"Fame at last, Joanie," said Moore. Just six years after she had stood in the dole queue in Los Angeles, it was the most exciting night of her life, and the peak of her career.

By her own admission, Joan Collins "went out with zillions and zillions of men" during her days as a young star in Hollywood. In the words of her sister, the novelist Jackie Collins: "Joan really led a blazing trail. When she came to Hollywood she was a very forceful, dynamic presence and - let me see, how can I put this politely - I think she did her own thing sexually."

"Were you unfaithful?" Joan was once asked by the comedienne Ruby Wax. "Yes," she replied, "but only on location. I used to say: 'It doesn't count on location.' Everybody was having a little fling. I don't suffer very much from guilt." But, as Joan herself has pointed out, women in the 1950s were still expected, at least to seem, to be virtuous. Her enthusiastic sex life made her the subject of crude jokes, and she was considered altogether too liberated by those she termed "less indulgent folk".

She went to Hollywood in the winter of 1954, a breathtakingly beautiful 21-year-old who had made her name playing sexily delinquent teenagers and sultry villainesses. Fleet Street had christened her "Britain's Bad Girl" and "The Coffee Bar Jezebel". Her new seven-year contract came courtesy of Darryl F. Zanuck, the tiny, randy boss of 20th Century Fox, who was inflamed by the vision of Joan semi-naked, with a fake diamond in her navel, in a ludicrous pyramids-and-camels epic entitled Land Of The Pharaohs.

Zanuck was a compulsive adulterer who propositioned every pretty actress who came his way. Soon after Joan joined the studio, he cornered her in a corridor and pressed her up against the wall. "You haven't had anyone till you've had me," he leered. "I've got the biggest and best and I can go all night." Joan very sensibly escaped and ran away.

One of Zanuck's little egocentricities was to have on his desk a lifesize mould of his private parts in solid gold, which he liked to show to impressionable girls. He once made the mistake of showing it to the frightening Joan Crawford. "Impressive, huh?" he said, grinning. Crawford sneered: "I've seen bigger things crawl out of cabbages."

In her own way, Joan Collins was equally formidable. She could justly claim that she had never used the casting couch to further her career nor slept with a man who was older than 42. At the time she was resisting Zanuck, she had already been married and separated from her first husband, the actor Maxwell Reed, and was in a new relationship with Charlie Chaplin's son Sydney. But word soon spread in Los Angeles that a gorgeous new Limey chick had arrived in town and Joan was deluged with invitations. At first she said no to all the Hollywood wolves, determined to stay faithful to Sydney. Eventually, however, she began to accept dates, most notably with Arthur Loew Jr - the tall, thin, extremely rich, 29-year-old playboy son of the president of MGM.

Loew was renowned for his wit, and Joan found him funny and sensitive. He took her to bed and she gave Sydney the elbow. One of Loew's many attractive qualities was his readiness to listen to women's problems. With his encouragement, Joan started seeing a psychoanalyst three times a week to "find herself" - only to discover that the shrink was much more interested in hearing all the juicy details of her love life.

In 1955, she achieved her first major professional success when she was given a leading part in the movie The Girl In The Red Velvet Swing - a role that had been turned down by Marilyn Monroe because she did not consider it serious enough. Her reviews were excellent. "Joan Collins is startlingly beautiful and sexy," said one. "She's a torrid baggage," said another. British newspapers immediately went wild with stories that Joan had made it so big in Hollywood that she was about to inherit Monroe's crown. The film also introduced Joan to a Hollywood legend, known as "OK Freddie". This ancient, wizened, lugubrious little extra was blessed with such a huge appendage that mischievous actors like Errol Flynn and David Niven would insist he displayed it to strangers. "Come on, Freddie," they would cry, "show us your c***," upon which Freddie would reply "OK" and haul the monster out to general astonishment. There is no evidence that Joan inspected the organ herself, but she liked to tell of the elegant garden party where Flynn and Niven were said to have persuaded Freddie to dress as a waiter and go round offering guests a silver salver, held low and piled high with snacks neatly arranged around an enormous sausage that turned out to be part of OK Freddie when one of the elderly lady guests prodded it with a fork.

Joan and Maxwell Reed were formally divorced in May 1956, and she moved in to Arthur Loew's ranchstyle house in the Hollywood Hills. Almost immediately she began pestering him to marry her. "From the first, Joan set her sights on the most glittering prizes available," according to her friend, the actress Zsa Zsa Gabor. In truth, Joan's affair with Loew was not very passionate and she had begun to resent the fact that, despite his wealth, he had given her nothing except "a few pieces of jewellery" - a somewhat surprising complaint, since at 22 she was already earning the modern equivalent of £420,000 a year. Loew pointed out that Joan had sworn she would never marry again, yet now she wanted to become engaged less than a week after getting divorced. But Joan did not want logic, she wanted commitment. She told Loew that unless he married her she would feel free to have affairs with other men.

Her next project was a film in Jamaica with Richard Burton, then 30, and Loew assumed that Joan would have her eye on her leading man, who had been her idol when she was a young drama student at RADA. But Joan resisted Burton's advances, recoiling to see at close quarters his pockmarked skin, blackheads and pimples, and bridling at his arrogant assumption that he could ravish every one of his leading ladies. A few days after filming began he told her how lovely she was, kissed her, and started to undo her bikini top, but she laughed it off and resisted him for two months. They played Scrabble instead and, inspired by the romantic beauty of the Caribbean and her determination to punish Loew for refusing to get engaged, Joan had an affair with a 26-year-old cameraman, a focus puller, who she said was the most exciting lover she had had so far.

Burton was seriously miffed that she preferred a humble member of the crew, tried to seduce her again, failed, and then dallied instead with several other women including, according to Joan, an elderly, almost toothless black maid. "Richard," Joan chuckled, "I do believe you would screw a snake if you had the chance." "Only if it was wearing a skirt, darling," he said. The affair with the cameraman was halted briefly when Arthur Loew flew out to Jamaica during the last week of filming. "Where's Joan?" asked the director one day. "She's laying Loew," said a wag. But the days of the relationship were numbered. Back in Los Angeles they had a huge row at a New Year's Eve party. "You're a f***ing bore," said Loew. "And you're a boring f***," retorted Joan. In search of less boring encounters she now embarked on a three-year spree during which she was to have so many lovers that Hollywood gave her a truly memorable nickname - The British Open.

At one point, it was reported that she had dated 14 men in a fortnight, among them Sydney Chaplin's elder brother, 30-year-old Charlie Chaplin Jr; the actors Dennis Hopper, who was only 18 and her first toyboy, Robert Quarry and Robert 'RJ' Wagner; the composer Buddy Bregman and the dissolute, 30-year-old playboy Nicky Hilton. For a while, Joan later confessed, she was considered to be the most shocking girl in Hollywood. She recalled how she was "scorned, maligned, criticised and lied about for my fairly normal mode of living, which was considered scandalous and disgraceful. "All of a sudden I found myself with the reputation of a swinger and a home-wrecker. Beverly Hills wives were supposed to live in fear in case I cast my green orbs in the direction of their men. Ninety-nine per cent of this was total fabrication."

But not all of it. One wife had very good reason to be suspicious of her. On March 8, 1957, the actor Harry Belafonte, with whom Joan had become friends with on the set of the musical Island In The Sun, married his girlfriend, Julie Robinson, who was four months' pregnant. Just a few weeks later however, in April, he was singing in Los Angeles and consummating his flirtation with Joan. She must have known that he had recently married - he was one of the most famous singers in America - and she was still having an affair with Nicky Hilton. But when she went to Belafonte's show she dressed as seductively as she knew how - in a low-cut black dress with a white mink stole and acres of bare shoulder and cleavage. Two nights later, they went to bed together in her apartment, and again the next night, and again the next night in his hotel. But they both knew that this could be no more than a three-night stand. Her affairs tended to last either one night or six months, Joan confessed.

The relationship with Nicky Hilton lasted longer than most: several months. As heir to the Hilton hotel chain he was immensely rich, tended to give his girlfriends chinchilla stoles and emerald bracelets, and, like Joan, he enjoyed fast sports cars, champagne, caviar and expensive clubs. His marriage to Elizabeth Taylor - her first - had lasted just nine months. He was a drug addict who also drank too much, a jaded wastrel with racist views, and the sort of crude "sexual athlete" who boasted about the size of his member, the number of his conquests and the duration of his sexual encounters. Hilton even kept an orgasm scoreboard-next to his bed - and a gun that he liked to fire in the middle of the night to frighten the neighbours. He was to die of a drugs overdose 12 years later, in 1969, at the age of 42.

Despite her busy love life, Joan found time to make films, including The Wayward Bus with the buxom Jane Mansfield. Playing Joan's husband was a tall, darkly handsome actor named Rick Jason. After lunch one day, according to Jason, Joan pointed out that they were not needed back on set for some time and suggested: "Let's go to my dressing room and f***." "What?" replied Jason. "I said: 'Let's go to my dressing room and f***." There was a pause. "Well?" "I told you I'm married." "Is that your answer?" Jason nodded. Joan rose from the table, he said, left him to pay the bill, and never spoke to him again unless they were filming a scene. Joan herself insists that this story is a total fabrication. And it must be stressed that despite her naughty reputation, she did not succumb to every man who propositioned her.

One night in Los Angeles, 39-year-old Dean Martin came banging insistently on her hotel door - crying "hey baby, you owe me one" - but she refused to let him in. "My reputation for being a bit of a swinger harmed my career and that upset me," she later said. "They all thought I was more interested in dating than acting." Among Joan's other male companions during this busy time in her life were Peter 'Taki' Theodoracopulos, an immensely rich, 21-year- old Greek playboy, later to become the High Life society columnist for The Spectator magazine, and Gordon White, the future Lord White and Hanson Industries tycoon. All these companions found her delightful, intelligent and charismatic, yet the turbulence in her private life sometimes left her melancholy and depressed.

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She regularly consulted an astrologer who told her that one day she would be very successful and always saved from physical or financial disaster at the eleventh hour, but that she would never be lucky or happy in love. And then, one summer's day, she noticed a young man in a restaurant staring at her. It was Shirley MacLaine's little brother, 22-year-old Warren Beatty, who was still unknown and yet to make his first film. Suddenly, Joan was plunged into a seriously heavy affair that would last for two years. At 26, she was four years older but already susceptible to her lifelong taste for younger men. They did not speak that night but soon afterwards they met at a party in Beverly Hills. The next day, Beatty left six messages with her telephone answering service and invited her out to dinner.

They ate Mexican, drank a cascade of margaritas, and talked non-stop. She liked his intelligence and sense of humour and discovered that he was Aries - apparently a good match for her as a Gemini - and that he lived in New York, had been a construction worker and had made some TV programmes but wanted to break into movies. When the joint closed well after midnight, they returned to her flat and went to bed together with none of that prissy nonsense about not having sex on your first date. From that first night they became an instant item. Beatty was a wizard in bed - "Aries men are ruled by their penises", her astrologer told her - and Joan discovered that he could make love five times a day, every day, and would even conduct telephone conversations while he was ravishing her.

Britt Ekland, who was to have an affair with him 11 years later, reported that he was "the most divine lover of all. His libido was as lethal as high-octane gas. "I had never known such pleasure and passion in my life. Warren could handle women as smoothly as operating an elevator. He knew exactly where to locate the top button. One flick and we were on the way."

Joan and Beatty became obsessed with each other and spent every possible minute together. Her friends thought she was mad: he was poor, unknown, unemployed, and maybe using her to further his career. But she was determined to follow her heart. Beatty moved in with her and she revelled in having at last a deep, stable, long-lasting love affair. Just four months after meeting, they were already planning to marry. To many onlookers they seemed a perfect couple. "She was really right for him," said Beatty's friend Verne O'Hara. "Sex drives Joan. She was besotted with him. And he was besotted with her."

But then came a serious complication. Joan discovered she was pregnant. Warren was appalled. Joan said she would like to keep the baby, but he was immovable: a baby now could sabotage his entire career just as it was taking off. He persuaded her to have an abortion. This was illegal in 1960, but, through one of his friends, they found a doctor in Newark, New Jersey, who was prepared to do it. Joan was terrified but they flew to New York, drove to Newark and she went through with it. That May, Joan turned 27, and perhaps out of guilt for making her have an abortion, Warren decided that they should become officially engaged. "I feel like having some chopped liver," he told her one afternoon and when she took the carton out of the fridge there, hidden in the meat, was a gold, diamond and pearl engagement ring. They announced that they planned to marry in January the following year, and Joan flew off to Rome to make the film Esther And The King.

Their time apart, however, was punctuated by anxiety and mutual suspicion that the other was having an affair. Slowly, their love was beginning to sour. Even Joan was starting to tire of Warren's incessant demands for sex. In 1961, she accompanied Beatty to London for the filming of The Roman Spring Of Mrs Stone, in which he was to co-star with the legendary but neurotic Vivien Leigh. Joan was suspicious about Beatty's closeness to the 47-year-old Leigh but uncertain whether they actually became lovers until one of his later girlfriends, the singer Madonna, reported years later that he had admitted it. At the time, all she knew was that the relationship was in trouble. She admitted that part of the problem was that she was no longer prepared to be subservient to a man and was sometimes too aggressive towards Beatty, who, being insecure, became belligerent in return.

Another problem was that his star status was rapidly rising while hers was in decline. She was now out of her contract with 20th Century Fox, with no films of her own on the horizon. The death blow was dealt when Beatty began a passionate affair with Natalie Wood, his co-star in the film Splendour In The Grass, and the wife of Joan's great friend Robert Wagner. Joan was determined to hang on to him for as long as possible. But when Natalie rented a house up in the hills at Bel Air and everyone knew that Warren was visiting her there regularly, even she realised that it was time to end the affair.

Being dumped by Beatty still rankled with Joan nearly half a century later, and when she was asked last year if it was really true that they had made love seven times a day she raised an eyebrow and purred: "Maybe he did, but I just lay there." In 2003, she described this as her "wild period". With the wisdom of maturity, she lamented the way the world had since changed. "This sexual stuff they do now is demeaning, degrading and horrible," she said. "Girls walk around with f*** me written on a T-shirt or flash their bottoms. What real, decent man is going to want to marry a girl like that? I don't understand the fascination of getting as drunk as possible and having as many partners as possible. Is this what the suffragettes worked for? For women to become slags?"

A year previously, Joan had written a powerful article deploring the modern "ladette" culture, which encouraged girls to sleep with scores of men, dress like harlots, swear like navvies and get so drunk that they were sick. She had come a long way since she had herself been castigated for immorality all those decades before.

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One of Joan's most traumatic affairs was with the tall, witty and very married film director George Englund. The relationship, in her days as a rising star, when she was 24 and he was 31, screwed her up so much that she went to see a psychoanalyst five times a week.

Joan and Englund were friends to start with until one night they found themselves staying alone in the same New York hotel and went to bed together. Joan was instantly smitten. Englund often promised to leave his wife and marry her, but he kept making excuses and it never happened. Joan forgave him when she discovered he had another mistress, but she could not accept that he and his wife were still sleeping together. One night, suspicious, she drove past the couple's house and was furious to see them undressing and going to bed together, even though he had promised her they slept in separate rooms.

Then he told her that his wife was pregnant again (they already had three sons). Joan was incensed, hurled a bottle of vodka and an ashtray at him, and shrieked: "That's my baby she's having. It should be mine! It's mine!"

She took revenge in the best way she knew. Zsa Zsa Gabor had told her that Rafael Trujillo Jr, the incredibly rich 24-year-old son of the vicious dictator of the Dominican Republic, had been lusting after Joan for ages, and he was renowned for showering his girlfriends with lavish presents. He had given Zsa Zsa a Mercedes convertible and a full-length chinchilla coat worth £28,000 in modern terms, and he had given a Mercedes to another actress mistress, Kim Novak.

The mercenary Zsa Zsa suggested an assignation with the man she called by his nickname, Ramfis, telling Joan: "It might be worth your while." "Joan's reply," she later wrote, "was: "I only want to meet him if he gives me a beautiful present." "Tactfully, I relayed the message to Ramfis, who said: "Okay, if she wants something, call up Van Cleef and Arpels and order a diamond necklace for her." "I obliged."

Joan flew from California to meet Trujillo in Florida - more than 3,000 miles for a one-night stand. He turned out to be a smooth, dark Latin, not especially handsome and married with six children. Moored off Palm Beach, they ate a magnificent dinner on his 350ft yacht, eating off gold dishes with gold cutlery, and afterwards they danced. Then, although Joan did not pretend to any particular affection or even lust for him, she went to bed with him.

"Afterward," wrote Zsa Zsa, "I asked Ramfis if he had had fun with Joan. "I picked her up in my yacht in Miami," he said tersely. "She was so boring that I put her ashore in Palm Beach." I said nothing, having quickly come to the conclusion that the clever Miss Collins had probably taken the diamond necklace and then proceeded to make herself appear to be so boring that she didn't have to do anything with Ramfis afterward."

Joan's own version of the story was that she did indeed sleep with Trujillo but did not receive the necklace until she returned to New York the next day. She claimed that she had wanted to return the bauble but was persuaded by Zsa Zsa and others that Trujillo would be insulted if she did, and that in any case a diamond necklace was nothing to a man as rich as he.

According to her own autobiography, George Englund's response to this action was to describe her as "worse than a street corner tart".​

When Joan Collins was contemplating marriage to the Hollywood playboy Arthur Loew in the Fifties, she told friends she needed to be sure he was the right one for her before they tied the knot. "I'd hate to be one of those girls with four or five husbands," she said.

Many years later, when her third marriage was over and she was preparing to wed her fourth husband, the Swedish former pop star Peter Holm, she announced: "There can be no more divorces. I absolutely cannot and will not go through that again." The union was to last just 13 months.

Joan first met Holm during a heatwave in the summer of 1983, as he lounged by a swimming pool belonging to mutual friends. He was 36, 14 years younger than her, and she was immediately struck by his tall, blue-eyed good looks, and the charming way he frolicked in the water with her young daughter, Katy. They soon became lovers, and in September of that year he moved in with her.

Joan, then at the height of her fame as Alexis Carrington in the TV soap Dynasty, thought Holm was charming, open and honest. He was also reputedly extremely well endowed and a magician in bed. But unknown to Joan he had a murky history. In 1975 he and 13 others had been arrested and charged with smuggling £1million of diamonds from Belgium into Sweden. Police also suspected that Holm and an ex-girlfriend had been involved in running a call-girl racket and brothel.

One of Holm's later girlfriends, Kathy Wardlow, said in 1988 that he had confessed to her that he never loved Joan but had set out deliberately to marry her for her money. Kathy claimed he boasted that Joan had fallen for him "like a silly schoolgirl" because he ravished her three or four times a day. He went on to admit that he fleeced her from the start, bugged her house and recorded all her telephone conversations so that he could control her and her friends. He had also told Kathy, she said, that he had hated having sex with Joan "because she was old and wrinkled", had had to think of other women while making love to her, and was constantly unfaithful.

Unaware of Holm's track record, Joan canoodled girlishly with him in public, trusted him completely, and allowed him to take over her finances as soon as he moved in with her. He became her manager, sacked all her advisers - accountant, lawyer, agent - installed a powerful computer to keep track of her business affairs, and within weeks had already drawn up a prenuptial agreement in the hope that she would marry him as soon as she had divorced her third husband, Ron Kass. Joan paid all their lavish living expenses and slipped him cash in restaurants. Her family and friends were worried. "We could all see that Peter was not right for her, but she wouldn't listen," said one of her girlfriends. She was blind to the faults that we could see - he was just after her money."

The saddest result of Joan's obsession with Holm was how it affected Katy, her daughter with Ron Kass. Katy hated Holm from the start, especially when he criticised or sneered at her father. "Every time the phone rang Holm would rush to answer it," according to one of Katy's nannies. "If it was Kass he would refuse to put him through to his daughter."

In the spring of 1984 the divorce between Kass and Joan was finalised. Their marriage had lasted 12 years, many of them extremely happy before Ron's cocaine habit helped drive them apart. The stress of the final parting was terrible, Joan said. It would have been even worse had she known that Peter Holm was already having an affair with a 22-year-old, Suzanne Anderson, whom he had picked up in an LA computer shop, and was using Joan's money to pay her £1,000-a-month rent and giving her pocket money as well.

She claimed that Holm told her Joan was "an old lady" and that he had to arouse himself by watching pornographic films before having sex with her.
Suzanne added that when Joan was out all day filming Dynasty, Holm "liked nothing better than to dress me up in Joan's clothes before making love to me on a desk in her home. We had to do it in his office because there were always other people around in the rest of the house".

It is hard to believe that Holm really found Joan unattractive because she looked stunningly sexy in the TV comedy film she made that summer, The Cartier Affair. The chemistry between her and her co-star, the hunky, 32-year-old David Hasselhoff, later to star in Baywatch, was so strong that he refused to film a naked love scene with her, not trusting his own reactions. He had recently married and explained that his wife would not approve.

In December 1984, despite the reservations of her friends, Joan said yes when Holm proposed and gave her a five-carat solitaire diamond engagement ring. When she came to sue him for divorce in 1987, and was asked why she had accepted such an expensive ring, there was laughter in court when she replied with her usual wide-eyed naivety: "How can you turn down a five-carat diamond?"

Joan had no idea that Peter was still being blatantly unfaithful to her, this time with a married 20-year-old Italian woman named Romina, whom he met regularly for sex while Joan was on the set of Dynasty. Holm persuaded his lover to divorce her husband, promising that he would marry Joan and then divorce her, taking half of her millions under Californian law, and would then like Romina to have his baby. He asked her to join him in Paris when he and Joan flew there in April the following year, and although she declined she believed his promises and divorced her husband only to find that Peter had no intention of leaving Joan.

He persuaded his previous squeeze, Suzanne Anderson, to fly to Paris instead and dallied with her in Joan's hotel suite when she was safely out of the way filming. A month later Joan and Peter travelled to London for a charity dinner to mark the couturier Bruce Oldfield's tenth anniversary in the fashion business. They were introduced to a 23-year-old Princess Diana, who told Joan: "You are very beautiful. I watch you on television all the time." Joan was not convinced. "I don't think the Princess watches Dynasty," she said. "She probably watches Coronation Street."

They sat at the same table, but Diana was later reported to consider Joan rather patronising and keen to upstage her. This was to prove a source of enduring tension. Seven months later, Joan was hugely offended to discover that President Reagan was hosting a dinner for Charles and Diana in Washington and she had not been invited.

To make the snub even more humiliating, her Dynasty co-star Linda Evans had been invited, along with several other Hollywood luminaries including Elizabeth Taylor, Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford, all of whom the royals had especially asked to meet. One American magazine reported that the Princess had refused to ask Joan because of her pushy behaviour at Bruce Oldfield's dinner and had snapped: "Just who does this woman think she is?"

On November 6, 1985, Joan married Peter Holm in Las Vegas. A week later, still determined to meet Charles and Diana during their American tour, she took Peter to Florida to join nearly 400 guests at a charity ball in Palm Beach where they paid £7,000 for their two tickets. Joan "shamelessly upstaged Princess Diana", according to one newspaper report at the time, "wearing a dress that was cut so low she was almost falling out of the top of it". Another report accused Joan, "dripping with diamonds", of trying to steal the limelight with "a spectacular gate-crashing performance". "The manoeuvre had all the split-second timing of a military operation - and the subtlety of a sledgehammer," wrote the reporter. "Her first assault came as she arrived at the hotel's main entrance in a revealing, figure-hugging black ball gown on the dot of eight o'clock, the very moment the Princess was to have gone through the same door. When the Princess arrived 20 minutes later it was clear that the 52-year- old actress, in her own distinctive style, was challenging Diana in the fashion stakes."

Dauntless as ever, Joan pulled her greatest stroke when it came to the dancing. A fellow guest noted how she bumped into Charles on the dance floor: "She just managed to position herself next to him and immediately started talking." Charles, it must be said, greatly enjoyed their encounter. He invited Joan to dance and told his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby that she was "very amusing and with an unbelievable cleavage, all raised up and presented as if on a tray. Eye-wander was a problem".

Diana, meanwhile, was said to have found Joan's behaviour "a huge joke", giggling into her napkin. Told of Joan's marriage, the Princess asked who her new husband was, then remarked: "I suppose that's the best she can do at her age."

At the end of November Joan switched on the 23,000 Christmas lights in Regent Street and was told to her delight that she had attracted an even bigger crowd than Diana had done four years previously. In the words of one royal observer, there was "little love lost" between these two rival superstars. Two days later Joan hit an even higher social jackpot when she and Lauren Bacall acted as comperes at a Royal Variety Show at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane and met the Queen. When Joan claimed afterwards that she had been so nervous that her knees had been knocking throughout the show, the comedienne Joan Rivers remarked: "I didn't think she could get them that close together."

Meanwhile Holm's behaviour had changed rapidly after the wedding, as though he no longer needed to pretend to love her. He became bossy and dogmatic, criticised Joan in public, sneered at her looks and made snide remarks about her age. He lost his temper much more than before, and was often cold, arrogant or sulky. Increasingly upset, Joan accused him of being an idle layabout who slept for much of the day while she was working her guts out to support them. They started squabbling about everything, especially renovation work on the huge mansion Joan had bought to be their marital home in Beverly Hills. They even argued over the height the aquarium should be. He claimed later that on one occasion she slapped his face and screamed: "I hate you! Get out of this house!"

In the spring of 1986 Ron Kass was diagnosed with cancer of the colon and had to have an operation in Los Angeles. Joan visited him in hospital and all the bitterness between them evaporated, but tragically he had only seven months to live. During a visit to Switzerland he suffered a stroke and had to be rushed into intensive care in Lausanne. Joan paid for two of his sons to fly from the U.S. to see him and for Ron to fly back to Los Angeles. For the last two months of his life she paid all his medical bills, furnished a flat for him near the hospital, and tried to ensure that he was as comfortable as possible.

Holm went berserk when he found out. "Don't waste our money on Ron Kass!" he screamed. "I'll spend my money the way I want to," Joan shrieked. Holm's cruel cold-heartedness towards Ron was finally to persuade Joan that she could put up with him no longer. Ron died in Los Angeles on October 7, 1986. He was only 51. A devastated Joan sprinkled soil onto his coffin, whispered "goodbye" and paid for the ceremony. "Ron was a sweet, lovely, gentle man until he started snorting the nose candy," she said.

In December, Joan served Holm with an inch-thick pile of divorce papers. Later that day he arrived home from a lunch appointment to be greeted by a team of security men throwing all his expensive clothes and shoes carelessly into the back of a pick-up truck. They refused to let him in, even to pick up his toothbrush or passport. Joan celebrated her freedom from Holm with a huge party and, a month later, in London and at a loose end, she telephoned a property developer friend, Charles Delevingne, and said she would like to meet some attractive, lighthearted young guys with whom to have a bit of fun while she was in town.

He invited her to lunch at his office along with two possible candidates, one of whom was a handsome, charming, smiley man named Bill Wiggins. Joan took one look at him and went weak at the knees. He took one look at her, recognised her instantly and said wickedly: "I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch your name." She giggled, and kept on giggling. By the end of the meal she was hooked. To make their meeting even more perfect, she discovered that his friends called him "Bungalow" Bill because - so they joked - he had nothing much up top but a hell of a lot down below.

She was 54, he was 40. After all the misery and traumas of her failed fourth marriage, naughty, jolly, virile young Bungalow Bill (he was said to have bedded one girl just 15 minutes after meeting her) was just the tonic she needed. Wiggy thought Joan was the funniest woman he had ever met as well as quick, brazen and gloriously good-looking, and he loved her starry aura and zest for life.

Back in Los Angeles divorce negotiations with Peter Holm were underway. In court he demanded to be given £35,000-a-month living expenses - £60,000 in today's terms - as well as the LA house and their villa in the South of France. Joan in turn wanted £1 million that she alleged he had stolen from her and the furniture from the LA house, along with the Christmas decorations and even the groceries from the fridge. The proceedings descended into an undignified squabble over minor possessions - desk lamps, wastepaper baskets, video tapes, CDs, indoor plants. Holm even demanded custody of a drawerful of screws. "That's the last screw he'll be getting from me!" snapped Joan. Holm insisted he was simply seeking recompense for having transformed Joan's finances through his shrewd handling of her affairs. And it was true that he left her much richer than he found her.

"I will say this for Peter Holm," she said. "Even though I ended up paying him $180,000, that was minuscule compared with what he'd done for me in the way of good deals." He had in fact made her £1.5 million out of one mini-series alone, so she could perhaps have been more generous towards him. Then again, his behaviour towards her had hardly been endearing.

On August 25, 1987, she was finally granted her divorce from Holm. She spoke of her yearning to find "the person who is there for ever, the friend, the lover, the one you live with and share everything with". This was not to be the genial Bill Wiggins. His great affection for Joan had not stopped him having affairs with other women - including the model Jilly Johnson - and they eventually went their separate ways.

But Joan without a man was like a bike without a pump. It would not be long before she had found another admirer to share her gloriously unpredictable life.​

With her green eyes and heart-shaped face, Joan Collins was so adorable as a baby that her mother hung a sign on her pram that read: "Please do not kiss me."

A star had been born. The elder daughter of Joe Collins - a highly successful theatrical agent whose clients were later to include Shirley Bassey, The Beatles and Tom Jones - she made her entrance into the world on May 23, 1933, at a nursing home near London's Paddington railway station. Her sister Jacqueline Jill Collins was born four years later.

Their early childhood was spent in and around nearby Maida Vale and was an idyllic one, said Joan, with plenty of love, comfort and security. For the rest of her life she was grateful to her parents for insisting on high standards of behaviour, manners and politeness. "If I'd so much as thrown a sweet paper out of the car, my father would have made me get out and pick it up," she once said. "And he was right. Each small incident like that is part of a larger picture. Abandon your standards and you're on a slippery slope."

Joan adored both her parents even though her father - who could be utterly charming and was attractive to women - was an extremely strict, dogmatic male chauvinist who expected to be obeyed in everything. He was also adulterous. "My father was quite a naughty lad in his time," said Joan. "Daddy did his bit for heterosexuality, as I have tried to do mine." Joan's mother Elsa, by contrast, was quiet, sweet, domesticated, and so loving that she would put the young Joan's ice-cream in the oven first to take the chill off. She worshipped her macho husband and was utterly subservient to him, which came to irritate both her daughters so deeply that they rebelled by becoming strong, independent, assertive feminists.

Joan, especially, had an extremely complex relationship with her father. "He was totally unloving," she once said. "He was detached, cold, hard, critical, difficult, acerbic, and everybody had to please him." And did she manage to please him? "No," said Joan sadly. That conflict was to cause most of her problems with men throughout her life. Because of him, she said, she spent decades chasing difficult men in the hope of recapturing Daddy. "I love my daughters," wrote Joe many years later, "but I am not the kind of parent who deludes himself that his children are superior to everyone else's. I did not think of them as outstanding in any way."

Even as late as 1986, when Joan was at the peak of her worldwide fame in Dynasty and Jackie had written a dozen international bestsellers, he confessed that he did not think they were particularly special. "We were never told we were beautiful, clever, funny, witty or good people," said Joan.

As the girls grew up, they developed completely different looks and characters. Joan was tiny, extrovert and so full of energy that her mother called her "Miss Perpetual Motion", although she was never prepared to help with any housework and told her mother imperiously that that was her job. Jackie was much bigger, quieter, more sensitive and thoughtful, a loner who decided at the age of eight to become an author. She started by copying dirty limericks into her diary and charging her schoolfriends to read them. Both daughters were sent to a genteel, expensive day school where they were expected to wear hats and gloves at all times in public, to have immaculate manners, to speak with perfect enunciation, and to eat pudding with a fork, not a vulgar spoon.

Joan took to it immediately, attracting a wide circle of friends, and developing by the age of 14 or 15 into a beautiful teenager with plenty of confidence, breezing into school in tight sweaters and make-up. "She had an early interest in boys and wasn't at all shy with men," said a contemporary, Belinda Webster. Jackie, on the other hand, did not enjoy school life as much. Even at the age of 13 her precociously well-developed figure was attracting wolf-whistles from adult men, but - by a schoolfriend's account - she was "scruffy, bolshie and mildly miserable". As she grew older, she became increasingly rebellious. At the age of 16, to their father's astonishment and pride, Joan was offered a place at the prestigious RADA drama school. She circled her eyes with thick black pencil and wore a ponytail, black polo-neck sweaters, short tight black skirts and black stockings. Men were mesmerised.

But despite the attention she received, Joan apparently remained a virgin until she was nearly 19. She had no interest in men who pursued her but was always the pursuer herself, choosing moody, distant men who played hard to get, chasing them ruthlessly, and eventually dumping them with callous regularity. It was, Joan believed, a classic example of a girl with a father complex who kept trying to prove to herself that she was irresistibly attractive. When she was 16 she had tried desperately to lose her virginity to a gorgeous 22-year-old blond called Barry. But despite several torrid bedroom encounters he failed to come up to the mark, beat and bruised her in his frustration, and the deed was never done. Typically Joan blamed herself for not being desirable or lovable enough to make him want her. Only much later did she discover that he was homosexual.

One of her other early admirers was a 19-year-old American Air Force serviceman, Larry Hagman, who had recently been appearing on stage with his mother, Mary Martin, in the musical South Pacific and was later to achieve worldwide fame in the TV series Dallas. Joan was "so breathtakingly beautiful that I thought she made Elizabeth Taylor look like a boy" Hagman wrote later. "I was a lark for her, since she normally dated older men, in their 20s and 30s. But we had some fun. I also went out with her sister Jackie, who was just as stunning. I never got anywhere with them, but boy, they were lots of fun."

Had he known that Jackie was only just 13 he would have run for the hills, for by now she was jailbait personified: four inches taller than Joan, sexually more mature, astonishingly shapely and much more knowing and streetwise. She looked 18 and jeered at Joan's prim behaviour when she was out on a date, calling her "goody two shoes". Feeling a misfit at home and at school, Jackie had started smoking, breaking the rules, playing truant, wearing thick make-up and high heels, camouflaging her bed with a bolster under the blankets and climbing out of her window to meet men and enjoy Soho discos and nightclubs. She drank, smoked marijuana, even tried cocaine, and was once nearly arrested by two policemen who thought she was a runaway. Eventually they sent her back home and luckily did not contact her parents. "I was a 'try anything girl'," she said. "If I'd been growing up in the Nineties rather than the Fifties I'd probably be dead by now."

When Joe and Elsa discovered how wild Jackie had become, they locked her in her room and burned her trendy clothes, but they failed to tame her and she escaped time and again. "I was utterly uncontrollable," she confessed. At the age of 15, Jackie was expelled from school, ostensibly for smoking while wearing her uniform but also because she had been ignoring all the school rules and playing truant for months. She wanted to become a journalist, but her father persuaded her to become an actress like her sister and promised to help her break into films.

"It never crossed my mind, nor Elsa's, that Jackie might spend frustrating years in a profession where she was always in Joan's shadow," Joe said.
"Jackie had the right attributes: good looks, a superb figure and acting talent too. But throughout her acting career she was always tagged 'Joan Collins' younger sister'."

Jackie decided to try her luck in Hollywood, where Joan was now successfully launching her career. She moved in with Joan, who introduced her to a host of her Hollywood acquaintances, including Marlon Brando, with whom Jackie had an affair. "He stared straight at my 39inch chest - men often talk to my chest - and said 'That's a great looking body you have, little girl'," she recalled. And indeed, as she herself admitted: "I had a spectacular body - big boobs and a teeny 20inch waist."

Sadly, this period of her life did little to advance Jackie's acting career, but it did give her invaluable source material for her best-selling books. The first of these, The World Is Full Of Married Men, came out in 1968, by which time Jackie, then 31, had long since decided against being an actress and was happily married with three daughters. She gave a copy of the book to her father, who stopped reading it after just a few pages. "Jackie's racy style was altogether too much for me," he admitted, and for the rest of his life he was never to read more than the first few pages of what he called her "potboilers". "I am not a prude," he wrote. "I'm thick-skinned and broad-minded and hard to shock [but it is] distasteful for a father to read his daughter's descriptions of sex."

His dislike of Jackie's books was eventually to ruin their relationship. Jackie's second book, The Stud, came out the following year and in 1976 the sisters collaborated on a film version of the novel, which was produced by their husbands, Ron Kass and Oscar Lerman. Jackie told a London newspaper that Joan, whose career had at that time apparently stalled somewhat, was "totally right for this part of a jet-set nymphomaniac lady. She seems to have grown into the part. It goes perfectly with her". Then, realising that it sounded as if she was saying that Joan was a nymphomaniac, she added hastily: "I don't mean she is like that, but she has spent a lot of time studying people like that."

It was around three years after the release of The Stud, when Joan had shot to global fame as Alexis Carrington in the American soap Dynasty, that a less-than-loving sisterly rivalry between Joan and Jackie began to smoulder and flame. Ever since childhood, Jackie had felt overshadowed by Joan and now believed that Joan should have given her much more credit for helping to revive her career. Joan in turn resented the suspicion that she might well owe much of her success to Jackie.

"Jackie is the more sane and sensible of the two sisters, down-to-earth and grounded, a trusty Libra versus Joan's flamboyant Gemini," wrote the composer Leslie Bricusse. "Both are ambitious high achievers and unspoken rivals, yet different as chalk and cheese. Both sisters are also as competitive as gladiators."

In the same year that The Stud was released Joan published her first biography, Past Imperfect, which caused an instant sensation. When it began to sell well, she decided to write a sexy fictional saga about working on a TV series like Dynasty. She called it Prime Time and had written just three chapters when the renowned Hollywood agent Irving "Swifty" Lazar sold the book to Simon and Schuster for a $2million advance. The British rights were then snapped up, sight unseen, for what at the time was a huge advance of £360,000. When Jackie protested that Joan was invading her territory as a novelist, Joan replied: "Come off it. You started your career acting when I was already doing it, so why shouldn't I have a bash at a bestseller?"

This didn't go down well. "Jackie can't help but feel Joan is crowding her territory," said Michael Korda, who worked as editor for both sisters.
Jackie's agent, Morton Janklow, admitted that the sisters had had "flare-ups" about Joan's trespass and Swifty Lazar agreed that "certainly there is sibling rivalry at times". Publicly, both women denied any feelings of competition. "We're not in each other's pockets, but we're good friends," said Jackie. "We're not the kind of sisters who call each other every day, but she knows I'm there for her." But Joan admitted 11 years later that they had drifted wide apart. "You can choose your friends but you can't choose your family," she said. "I love my sister, but I'm not as close to her as I used to be. I don't think she was thrilled when I started writing."

Jackie said that although both she and Joan had suffered difficult relationships with their father, she had been able to come to terms with it, but Joan had not. "I think she was constantly searching for the man of her dreams who would be not a father figure but who would replace the father figure," she said. "Maybe that's why she's been married a few times." One witness who had once been close to both women told me: "Joan and Jackie actually loathe each other and always have done, and Joan is jealous of Jackie because Jackie is so much richer than she is."

Indeed, in the 2004 Sunday Times Rich List, Jackie was the 16th richest British film and TV millionaire and estimated to be worth £66 million, while Joan was nowhere to be seen.

When Prime Time was finally published in October 1988, the book shot within a few days to number three in the bestseller lists. But the critics were savage. The anti-pornography campaigner Mary Whitehouse called Joan's book a "combination of violence and obscenity ... phoney ... trash".

Jackie was under the impression that Prime Time sold very few copies and was reported as having said at a party that "the poor dear's book just seems to have sunk". In fact, it sold 50,000 copies in hardback and later 300,000 in paperback. Not quite in Jackie's league, but very respectable.

Anyway, it is unlikely that Joan, now 74 and happily married to her fifth husband Percy Gibson, 33 years her junior, will be remembered for either her writing or her acting. Instead, she holds a unique place in British life as a warm, feisty, funny, self-deprecating, immensely human woman who made us laugh and cheered us up with her outrageous antics, absurdities and startlingly disastrous mistakes.

She always said "yes" to whatever life offered her, often when she should have said "no", and her indomitable optimism and joie de vivre are a glorious example that should give hope to us all. "Life's quite simple, really," she said last year. "Be content with what you have. Try to find happiness in your life, whether it's looking after chickens or your husband or your children or grandchildren."

But she also realised how lucky she had been to be born with what she called "the happy gene", she said. "Percy and I were looking through old photographs the other day and he turned to me and said: 'Oh look, Joan, you're always laughing.'"

So will he for many more years, with any luck - unless, of course, she meets some gorgeous, hunky, irresistible 18-year-old when she's 93.​

Every time an article is written about me or any of my contemporaries who’s had the fortune and discipline to look good at a certain age, I am struck by the tone of astonishment, and the certainty that something is being done secretively to beat the devil.

Why should people be so surprised that women in their 50s, 60s and 70s look sexy and absolutely wonderful? Unfortunately today, with the media’s excessive emphasis on youth, youth, youth, some women over 40 are beginning to feel unsexy and with that often comes a tremendous feeling of insecurity.

The fact that there are scores of women looking stunning and far younger than their biological age seems to be overlooked, or, if recognised, then met with wonderment. Certainly there are dozens of over-50 actresses who look great: Sophia Loren, Susan Sarandon, Ursula Andress, Stefanie Powers, Raquel Welch, Barbara Eden, Joanna Lumley, Linda Gray - the list is endless and these are just the actresses!

I have many friends in their 60s, 70s and 80s, not in the limelight, but who all look absolutely stunning. In France, they revere and respect older women, as they do in most Latin countries, where they consider them to be delightful and to possess true sexual allure.

It is a fact that many of the most famous women in history were sexually active well into middle age and beyond. Catherine the Great, in her 60s, was reputed to take young lovers some 40 years her junior to bed. Mae West, who lived to 90, had a lover 45 years younger than her, and she coined the classic phrase: ‘It’s not the men in my life, but the life in my men.’ Sarah Bernhardt, the great French actress and the legendary Coco Chanel both had lovers in their twilight years.

A lot of young people think that sex is the prerogative of the young. Many are appalled by the idea of the over-40s or even their parents being or looking sexy or even, God forbid, having sex. This is almost a throwback to days of puritanical religious intemperance, when sex was meant only for reproduction. I believe we’ve come far beyond those beliefs in our new secular world, and even in some parts of the religious one as well.

Now that sex is used to sell everything from vacuum cleaners to plane tickets, it should be accepted that it’s everyone’s prerogative to enjoy it and have it, regardless of age. It makes me happy when I read about a couple marrying in their 80s, or rediscovering their lost love from 50 years ago. Today, 60 is the new 45 and 50 is more like 35.

As for ‘old’ age, I’m with that great philosopher Bernard Baruch, who said: ‘Old age is always 15 years older than I am.’ How true! Or Groucho Marx: ‘Growing old is something you do if you’re lucky.’

The Queen Mother was a fabulous example of living life to the fullest extent until well over 100 and having plenty of admirers. It’s called use it or lose it; whether it’s working your brain or your butt, you’ve gotta work at it. The number of people over the age of 60 is approaching 1 billion - that’s one in seven of the world’s total population - and by 2050 it will be many more.

Getting older should be just that: getting older, but not becoming old and losing one’s sex appeal. I believe that one is as young as one looks, so it’s absolutely crucial to keep your skin and figure in the best shape you can - advice which young girls today should heed. Time and time again I see women over 50 who have taken care of themselves looking glamorous, and girls in their 20s and 30s looking... well, rather rough.

Maintenance needn’t be as time-consuming as so many seem to think. Protecting one’s skin with sunscreen and foundation takes as long as cleaning your teeth thoroughly. Doing 20 minutes of stretching, light weights and floor exercises three times a week takes the same amount of time as a long coffee break = and eating a tuna fish salad, sardines on toast or scrambled eggs is surely preferable to a Big Mac or KFC. It’s not a question of being obsessive about what one does to look and feel young - I’m not. It’s about doing it so that it becomes almost second nature.

I won’t deprive myself of what I feel like having - I eat chocolates, cookies and nuts; I drink wine and the occasional vodka martini. But I have treated my body as I would a car, only the best in petrol, care and maintenance, and I’m happy to say it seems to have worked for me.

I’ve always been sceptical about the so-called miracle creams that proliferate the glittering cosmetic counters of major department stores worldwide. I raise an even more cynical eyebrow when I see glossy magazine advertisements of gorgeous 20-something models recommending and extolling the virtues of anti-ageing creams. Who do they think they’re kidding? Are the big cosmetic companies convinced that the average woman is deluded enough to believe the preposterous claims in their advertising?

Or is it just that youth sells everything today, so let’s show pure youthful beauty and let the poor fool who buys the product think that she, too, could look like the model if she used the product?And to add insult to injury, the photos are retouched until the models’ faces and skin have perfection possible only in a two-year-old. What sane woman is going to believe that a lotion can refine, renew and transform skin in ten minutes?

The advertising agencies must be laughing their heads off at the thought of their target customers buying their ‘ miracle’ products. It’s really quite sad to see a lady earnestly discussing with a make-up expert at the beauty counter how a particular cream is going to erase the 40 years of hard living etched in her face. The ageing process of the skin is attributable to so many factors - the pollutants skin has to cope with, air conditioning, heating, general exposure to the sun, wind and the elements, not to mention the various toxins we put into our body through what we eat and drink.

Take anti-cellulite creams. These are one of the great mythical jokes perpetrated on modern woman. The only way to reduce cellulite is to radically banish junk and fatty food from your diet, take copious amounts of fish oil and other supplements and, yes, dear reader, exercise, exercise, exercise until your derriere and everything on it falls off. We all know what a drag that is, but there’s no way around the drudgery of reality. We live in a quick-fix society where we need instant gratification for everything. Too fat? Get lipo-sucked. Stringy hair? Glue on extensions. Wrinkles and lines? Head to the beauty shop for a pot of the latest miracle skin stuff.

It’s all a beautiful £1 billion con foisted upon insecure women by canny cosmetic conglomerates.The Advertising Standards Agency - the watchdog that protects the public against false claims - ruled against one of these companies recently. The firm claimed its anti-cellulite serum could actually melt away the fatty look of cellulite. The ASA concluded the ads were misleading, making medical claims they could not stand up and ordered a recall of all the products.

Now, please don’t get the impression that I’m against any skinprotecting beauty product ever produced. Au contraire, since my early teens my mother, aunts and even my grandmother encouraged me to take care of my skin by proper cleansing, moisturising and protecting. This was long before the sophisticated products available today that boast they can do everything except whistle Dixie. I used the simplest products - cold cream, baby oil, Vaseline, rose water - all the generic skin products available at the local chemist and then a low-priced foundation base usually from Woolworth’s. Mummy also didn’t let me have too many sweets or chocolates and made me eat all my greens and insisted on a teaspoon of cod liver oil each day - ugh! But it worked for Granny, Mummy and my aunts, and it worked for me.

Although I was making a life-long commitment to skincare, I still baked my face and my body in the sun at every possible opportunity, until one day, recently arrived in Hollywood, my glamorous friend Cappy, whose skin was like porcelain though she was almost 30, berated me for my sunbathing habits. Do you want to look like them when you’re 40, she asked, indicating a posse of darkly tanned lizard-like women lapping in the sun by the Beverly Hills Hotel pool? God, no, that couldn’t happen to me, I laughed, with all the cockiness of a 21-year-old.

‘It certainly will if you don’t quit putting your face in the sun,’ said Cappy sternly. ‘Once you get sun damage, there’s absolutely nothing you can do to get rid of it, so stop now or you’ll regret it for ever.’ So I took the advice of one of the most youthful women I ever met and since then have been fanatical about protecting my face, if not my body, against the sun’s rays in summer and winter.

After moisturising, I slap on foundation, which protects skin far more efficiently than any of the socalled miracle creams and I always wear a hat or a cap because even on the darkest of days the sun’s rays can penetrate through the clouds and cause damage. That’s my miracle cream, and many of my girlfriends who have followed the same advice still look amazingly good. I strongly believe in protecting first rather than shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted.

With harmful UVA and UVB radiation in the environment, it is essential to start your regime as soon as possible if you want to stave off the ageing process and look glamorous well into later life. Some media witches have mocked me for always wearing make-up. But they should take note, for I can assure them that if you take two women over 50, one of whom has always protected her face and one of whom has never done anything other than wash with soap and water, guess which one will have the best skin? And not just slightly less lined, but skin that looks 20 years younger.

But it is essential to always put something moisturising on your face and then, with foundation on top, you will avoid much of the wear and tear of ageing. I’m often amazed when some lined, red-faced, blotchy skinned woman proudly announces that she’s never allowed an ounce of make-up touch her face. Well, bully for you, ma’am, if you want to go to the grave looking like Dracula’s grandma, but if you want to look young, then start applying make-up.

I know it’s not possible to retain the dewy skin of a two-year-old, but it is possible to look good after une age certain, as the French say. But the most costly miracle creams used remedially are not going to erase a lifetime of living in your face if you didn’t start caring yourself in your teens. So teach your children well: it’s never too early to start - as the amount of creams and lotions aimed at babies’ delicate skin can attest to - so start now!

One of the delicious advantages of living in Los Angeles is the plethora of wonderful classic movies that are constantly aired on all the cable channels. Most of the really old ones from the Thirties to the Fifties are put on in the afternoons or very early mornings, so our trusty machine has to work overtime to record them.

What strikes me again and again about these movies is how hunky and masculine the majority of the male stars were. Boom Town was on recently, with the extremely macho co-stars Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable. Although Gable was by far the better looking and taller (he kept referring to Tracy as 'Shorty' in the film) Spencer Tracy was his equal in the he-man department.

The same goes for most of the male movie stars from the golden era of Hollywood: Anthony Quinn dancing the tango with Rita Hayworth in Blood And Sand oozed masculine sex appeal, as did his co-star Tyrone Power. John Garfield, in The Postman Always Rings Twice with gorgeous Lana Turner, sizzled a great deal more than the pale remake with Jessica Lange and Jack Nicholson. John Garfield was a true man's man. Obviously something of a ladies man, too, as he died in bed with his mistress.

Another great example of a totally masculine-looking actor from the 30s and 40s was, believe it or not, Laurence Olivier. As Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, you could almost smell the scent of the stables as he canoodled with Cathy - a somewhat miscast Merle Oberon. I would have thought Vivien Leigh or Hedy Lamarr would have been better, but then I consider them to be two of the most beautiful actresses to have graced the silver screen.

There are so many examples of great-looking guys from that era who were entirely superior to the heartthrobs of today in the testosterone stakes. To me, many of these modern actors look a bit wimpy.

Scientists, it seems, have come to an unusual conclusion about the phenomenon of today's 'pretty-boy' actors compared with the he-men of yesteryear. It seems that as the nation's health improves, women's tastes in the men they fancy softens. When health is poor, women go for rugged, tough-looking men, who they expect will give them strong babies.

Hence, I suppose, in the Thirties and Forties, during the Depression and the war, they flocked to see Douglas Fairbanks, Victor Mature, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and, of course, Mr Uber-Macho, John Wayne. But when a nation's health improves, and life expectancy rises, women become attracted to more feminine-looking men, who appear to have gentler natures to match their little-boy faces.

It's an odd theory, but universities have done their research with more than 5,000 women, and it seems that Zac Efron beats Sean Connery by a long shot: modern women prefer more cutesy-looking movie stars such as Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner, stars of those Twilight vampire movies. These boys cause squeals of delight from young girls and are mobbed whenever they appear in public.

However, as a young girl, that wasn't the kind of man I went for at all, and I'd say it was the same for most of the women of my generation. I wrote off asking for autographed pictures to many of the post-war British 'Idols of the Odeons', most of whom were tall, dark and broodingly handsome. When these photographs came back, they were proudly stuck under my school desk lid - I had James Mason, Stewart Granger and Maxwell Reed. In fact, so taken was I by the latter that I foolishly married him when I was 18.

Soon afterwards, I was lucky enough to appear in a series of films with the most attractive and masculine-looking male stars: Gregory Peck in The Bravados was not only extremely handsome and a great actor, but he was also one of the most elegant and gentlemanly of all, without ever losing his masculine appeal or his tough side.

Paul Newman, who starred with me in Rally Round The Flag, Boys!, was almost too beautiful, but his crooked nose and jutting chin made him a true hunk. Those eyes were indeed icy-blue. Paul had a fabulous sense of humour and, even though he loved cooking, he was definitely a man's man. He loved his beer drunk straight from the bottle and, when suffering form the occasional hangover, he would dunk his entire head into a bowl of ice and water for 20 minutes. What a guy!

Another actor who fancied himself as a real Neanderthal was Richard Burton. I played opposite the pockmarked Welshman in Sea Wife, and he immediately made no secret of the fact that he was not only the ultimate seducer, but the leader of the pack as far as hellraisers were concerned. He admitted to me that he would 'f*** a snake if it was wearing a skirt!' He also told me that if I did not succumb to his charms, I would ruin his record of sleeping with all his leading ladies. I realised that Burton was one of that rare breed - a true macho movie star. But in no way was I tempted, although I saw other women fall like ninepins at his feet.

Other hellraisers of that time and drinking buddies of Burton were Oliver Reed, Richard Harris and Peter O'Toole. All of them were good examples of the macho heterosexual movie stars. I worked with Richard Harris in Game For Vultures, shot in South Africa. It was a pretty boring shoot, so a lot of drinking took place - on and off the set. I must admit I was involved in a few marathon boozing sessions with Richard, but he always knew his lines the next day, even after a night of debauchery.

I never worked with Peter O'Toole, but several years ago I sat next to him on a Los Angeles to New York flight, when he dared me to match him drink for drink. I tried. He won, and the seven-hour flight was lost in a blur of vodka martinis. Silly me.

When I worked with the fabulous Robert Mitchum in Michael Winner's remake of The Big Sleep, I was quite nervous because of his tough-guy reputation, and I expected to be black and blue from the fight scene we were supposed to do. I'd just finished a film with another hard man - Jack Palance - who'd roughed me up severely in our fight scene. He was a bit of a bully and pushed me around savagely, no doubt to prove how butch he was. But Mitchum, who epitomised the strong, silent type, was as gentle with me as if he was playing with a kitten. He had to wrestle me to the floor, fling me across the room, grab my hair, twist my neck and then, the grand finale, throw me across his knee and spank me.

Well, I didn't feel a thing throughout it, and when I asked him how he had managed to make the fight so realistic without leaving the tiniest mark on me, he replied in his laconic manner: 'Honey, I've been doin' this for about a hundred years - I'm an actor who knows how to play rough, and I'm not about to hurt an actress just for a goddamn scene.'

Another huge, manly star graced Dynasty for one episode. When Charlton Heston walked onto the set, everyone kow-towed in deference. One of the handful of great leading men of the Fifties and Sixties, he received the respect he deserved. Many of these actors had an aura of 'don't mess with me, kiddo'. I met Humphrey Bogart at a party soon after my arrival in Hollywood and he scared me to death. However, when I got to know him better he was a charming family man.

There's a big difference between the male stars of bygone years and today's slightly metrosexual-looking actors. Johnny Depp, Leonardo Di Caprio and Sean Penn are all wonderful actors, but they are chameleon-like when it comes to their place on the masculinity meter.

As for today's TV stars, to me they seem just like ordinary, faceless men cut from the same male cookie-cutter. I don't recognise most of them, and in any case their star doesn't burn brightly for very long on TV nowadays. Viewers are fickle and shows are cast off the networks faster than old bait.

These men pale in comparison to the strappingly rugged TV stars of the Sixties and Seventies - Tom Selleck in Magnum P.I. was tall, powerful-looking and so handsome. Even without hair, Telly Savalas in Kojak looked like a real man. And there were so many more: Jack Lord in Hawaii 5-0, James Garner in The Rockford Files, Michael Douglas in The Streets Of San Francisco.

So who is the sexiest, most masculine male star of all time? I think it has to be Marlon Brando. In a series of spectacular performances, he put his indelible mark on what defines masculinity. Unforgettable in a dirty white T-shirt in A Streetcar Named Desire, wearing a beat-up old jacket in On The Waterfront and clad in leather motorcycle gear in The Wild Ones, his will always be the most iconic and desired of images.

And what of today's stars? Who will top the list in decades to come? Well, there's Jeff Bridges, who well deserved his recent Oscar. There's George Clooney, and then there's George Clooney and, oh yes, don't forget George Clooney. But I'm afraid, boys, that's about it.

Joan Collins has confessed to once taking cocaine at a wild party, but insists that she's still passionately anti-drugs. The glamorous 76-year-old revealed she was forced to try the drug by a friend of her addict third husband Ron Kass.

Speaking to Piers Morgan on ITV's Live Stories tonight, Miss Collins said: ‘I am so anti-drugs. Once somebody forced me to take some coke and it was just so horrible. 'I would never [willingly] take drugs. I never believe in abusing myself like that.’ The incident is believed to have occurred in the late 1960s at a St Tropez nightclub.

Miss Collins said she treated her body 'like a temple' and has been able to keep her youthful looks by not going under the knife. Piers Morgan points at that she 'hasn't aged at all'.

'That's because I haven't done all those things to it, like those ladies do,' Miss Collins said. 'I'd rather just grow old gracefully, while fighting all the way. I have always, always, always used make-up and kept my face out of the sun since I was 20.'

The star also said she fell on hard times before landing the role of Alexis Carrington in 1980s hit Dynasty and was humiliated when everyone recognised her when she went to sign on at the dole queue. I’ve always believed that life is not a bowl of cherries, it’s a bowl of cherry pits and the ‘happy ever after-syndrome’ I was aware was just a fairytale,’ she explained.

Miss Collins also told how she had no regrets over aborting her first child after falling pregnant with fiancé Warren Beatty’s baby when she was in her mid twenties.

She added: ‘It would have been absolute career death for me to have done that, even though I wasn’t yet getting to a broody period, I got to my broody period a couple of years later but it was just, it would have been unthinkable to have a child.

'He didn’t have any money, I had nothing, and I believe if you are going to bring a child into the world that you have to have a responsibility to that child. I’m so happy that Tara [her daughter with the late Anthony Newley] was my first child, I love her dearly and it would not have been the same had I had another child, so I know I made the right decision.’

The actress is now happily married to fifth husband Percy Gibson, 44 and has become the face of Alexis Bittar jewellery.​